Rahim Mohamed: ICC’s Netanyahu witch-hunt is a farce, so naturally Trudeau won’t condemn it

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With Israel now facing yet another round of trumped-up charges in the international arena, Canada’s leadership is predictably nowhere to be seen.

Top International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan announced on Monday that he was seeking warrants for the arrests of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, ignoring the pesky detail that he has no standing to prosecute either man — or, for that matter, any Israeli official.

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Khan bobbed and weaved around the ICC’s non-jurisdiction over Israel, a non-signatory of the court’s founding Rome Statute, in a 16-minute recorded statement, linking the two men to a litany of criminal offences “committed on the territory of the State of Palestine” over the past seven months. He announced in the same video that he was seeking corresponding arrest warrants for three senior Hamas officials, including Hamas Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, bogusly implying an equivalency between the terrorist organization and Israel’s democratically elected government.

Khan’s specious legal reasoning, invoking the Palestinian Authority’s disputed ratification of the Rome Statute a decade ago, was immediately and widely panned, including by senior officials in his native United Kingdom.

“The UK, as with other countries, does not yet recognize Palestine as a state and Israel itself is not a party to the Rome Statute, so we’ve previously made clear our position that the ICC does not have jurisdiction in this case,” said a spokesman for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday.

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also indicated on Monday that he likewise wasn’t buying what the ICC’s Khan was selling, stating, “The ICC was established by its state parties as a court of limited jurisdiction.”

“Those limits are rooted in principles of complementarity,” continued Blinken, “which do not appear to have been applied here amid the prosecutor’s rush to seek these arrest warrants rather than allowing the Israeli legal system a full and timely opportunity to proceed.”

Meanwhile, Blinken’s boss President Joe Biden raised objections to the substance of the ICC Prosecutor’s allegations against Netanyahu and Gallant, which included using hunger as a weapon of war and intentionally withholding “indispensable” resources like water from Gazans.

“It’s clear Israel wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection,” Biden said on Monday at a White House reception for Jewish American Heritage Month. “Let me be clear: What’s happening is not genocide.”

Netanyahu for his part called the accusations against him and his defence minister “beyond outrageous” on Tuesday, claiming that Israel currently supplies Gaza with nearly half of its water, versus just 7 per cent before the war.

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The swift and unequivocal statements of support from the two anglosphere countries gave way to predictable foot-dragging on the part of the Trudeau government.

The prime minister was MIA for much of the day on Tuesday, leaving Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly to field the first round of questions about the pending ICC warrants. When he finally spoke on the matter at an afternoon news conference in Philadelphia, he was content to toe the party line established earlier in the day, expressing concern about the ICC’s putative “sense of equivalency” between Israeli and Hamas leadership, but stopping short of condemning the chief prosecutor’s actions altogether.

In fact, the closest thing to an official Canadian pronouncement on the matter has come from NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who called on Monday for the prime minister to abide by any forthcoming ICC arrest warrants.

No word yet on whether Singh intends to take Loblaws CEO “Greedy” Galen Weston to the ICC for his role in the starvation of Canadian civilians.

The prime minister’s failure to immediately condemn the ICC prosecutor’s groundless witch-hunt follows on the heels of his underwhelming response to South Africa’s similarly frivolous suit against Israel at the International Criminal Justice (ICJ). Trudeau said in January that he supported the ICJ as an institution but didn’t necessarily support “the premise of the case brought forward by South Africa”: a position he’s done little to clarify over the past four months.

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Trudeau, who has no training in international law, could perhaps be forgiven for his evident lack of clarity over the somewhat convoluted question of the ICJ’s standing to hear South Africa’s genocide claim against Israel. No such nuance exists in the case of the ICC’s subsequent intervention. Israel has never signed the Rome Statute, meaning the court has no more authority to arrest Netanyahu on war crimes than it does to cuff Israeli actress Gal Gadot over her cringey COVID-era rendition of “Imagine” (a crime against humanity if ever there was one.)

Trudeau, the longest-tenured leader in the G7, should by now at least be able to call a clear offside in the international court system. He’ll never get an easier call than the one the ICC’s top prosecutor just handed him.

In holding his tongue over the ICC’s farcical Israeli witch-hunt, Justin Trudeau betrays either a profound ignorance of the basics of international law or a cowardly instinct to placate the most radical elements of the Liberal party’s divided caucus.

Either way, he’s shown once again that he’s a deeply unserious leader who’s dangerously ill-equipped to represent Canada in international affairs.

Justin Trudeau’s latest puttering over the ICC’s political overreach is, sadly, par for the course.

National Post

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